


Look Right Through It

by Ferritin4



Series: Sentinel Caps [2]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sentinels & Guides, M/M, Romance, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-04-27
Packaged: 2018-10-24 13:12:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10742382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferritin4/pseuds/Ferritin4
Summary: It had taken Nicklas quite a while to realize that Alex gotjealouswhen he zoned out.Alex was a possessive person; Nicklas was attentive enough to figure that out on his own. Alex didn’t like it when the people he liked ignored him, and he fucking loved it when those same people paid attention to him, only to him. This had never been a point of contention between them, since Alex could make Nicklas pay attention to him simply by existing.





	Look Right Through It

Toronto smelled like garbage.

Not like metaphorical garbage; Nicklas was mature enough, and old enough, and aware enough of how fucking foul garbage could really smell to be above that simplistic of a put-down. No, it was just that the Air Canada Centre seemed to have something wrong with its service elevators and one of the basement lifts sent up subtle, ephemeral tendrils through the floorboards, smelling very faintly of rotting trash.

 

* * *

Nicklas had always had an excellent sense of smell, which he supposed was probably just latency and early presentation. He’d been what his schoolteachers and hockey coaches had retroactively referred to as ‘externally normosensitive’ until he was fifteen, and then the auras had started, and the puking had followed, and everyone had figured it out.

He was rebranded as a hypersensete, a sentinel, because ‘externally hypersensitive’ wasn’t a thing. You couldn’t be normal on the inside and turned up to eleven on the outside; you had to be overwhelmed by reality, anxious and brittle and mentally nauseated. You weren’t allowed to cope with it. Who could survive the barrage of smells and sounds and light and color, could suffer the bizarre drowning feeling of focusing down on a single physical sensation without it driving them a little bit insane? Who among them could endure such slings and arrows? Nobody, apparently.

“It’s hard, I know, Nicklas,” his normosensitive hockey coach Anders had told him at age sixteen. This was a man Nicklas had known for nine years, and Nicklas had looked at him and wondered if _regular_ life was hard for Anders. Did he struggle to deal with how reality affected him?

Why Nicklas had to be a freak just because he was moderately well-adjusted to his own experience was a source of constant annoyance.

 

* * *

He’d spent the years spanning fifteen through nineteen thinking that with enough care and attention he could adjust himself to deal with anything, and then he’d moved to North America, joined the NHL, and met Alex Ovechkin for the third time.

 

* * *

North America _smelled_ different, and not just like trash. Everything smelled weird, even things that shouldn’t have; airplanes, bathrooms, food, clothes — everything. It was disorienting and frequently disgusting, and Nicklas did what he always did: took his breaths slowly, and adjusted.

The NHL was louder than normal, mostly. Nicklas could still get stuck on the feeling of his glove against his wrist, on the feeling of his blades through the soles of his skates, on the way they cut into the surface of the rink. He could hear just how deep the ridges of metal were digging, could breathe in the few extra crystals of airborne ice and get a little a lost in it. He knew the feeling, and the feeling knew him. He had tricks; he could stop it if he tried.

“You’ve developed some rudimentary versions of commonplace techniques used by guides to aid sentinels in daily life,” his therapist had told him at age seventeen, and Nicklas had smiled and thought, _yes, I know._

He had met Alex Ovechkin twice, once at the draft and once at Worlds, both quickly, whirlwind, in passing. Nicklas had been alarmed and overwhelmed in the normal way; Nicklas had been amazed and delighted.

The third time he’d met Alex, the third — _the_ time, that time, he’d launched himself into Nicklas at practice to celebrate a well-timed passing drill and Nicklas had closed his eyes and taken a breath and kind of fallen off a cliff.

 

* * *

Alex smelled — he did not smell like trash.

He had a face, and a whole, whole _thing_ going on with his handsiness, and he was a trained guide so when it turned out that known hypersensete Nicklas Backstrom frequently turned into a hot fucking mess around him, the conclusion had been logical.

 

* * *

The irony of his guide being the most intensely distracting thing in his entire life was not lost on Nicklas.

 

* * *

There were bars that smelled like vomit; there were hotels that smelled like cigarette smoke and stale French fries. There were bus rides that smelled so badly of diesel exhaust that Nicklas got headaches and had to skip dinner, which now tasted bitter and had the inviting texture of wet wood.

“Hey, Nicky,” Alex said, letting himself into Nicklas’s hotel room.

Nicklas was sitting on the desk chair with his eyes closed, trying to breathe himself into a place where he could eat. He would get there. He always got there.

Alex smelled like aftershave and toothpaste and the fine, distinctive, warm earthiness of his skin. Fuck. Nicklas breathed out.

“Hi,” he said belatedly.

“You okay?” Alex asked. Nicklas kept his eyes closed. Alex was next to him, and then he was sitting on the desk. Alex’s leg was propped up against the arm of Nicklas’s chair. Nicklas could feel the heat of him; he could hear the silken hush of Alex’s basketball shorts as they brushed the edge of the desk, dragged over Nicklas’s bare knee.

“I’m fine,” Nicklas said. “The bus smelled bad.”

“I know,” Alex said. Nicklas opened his eyes and raised one eyebrow.

Alex wasn’t exceptionally handsome, but he wasn’t a normal-looking man. He smiled, white teeth and sharp, brutalist cheekbones, something from Picasso, something out of a strange dream.

“Even I can tell it stink,” Alex said. “I bring you something to fix, here,” he told Nicklas, and Nicklas looked down and took the book out of Alex’s hands without thinking to ask.

It was in Russian, and badly beaten up. It was a paperback and it had a picture of a horse on the front, but the kind of drawing that went with a fiction book, a novel. Nicklas looked back at Alex.

“Smell,” Alex said.

“Smell this book,” Nicklas clarified.

“Don’t think you can read,” Alex said, shrugging. Excuse me?

“Fuck you, I can read,” Nicklas said. “I can read Swedish _and_ English. _Smell_ it? What’s it about?” he asked.

Alex stood up off the desk and came around to stand behind Nicklas; Nicklas spun the chair to face him.

“You can give back,” Alex said, a parody of long-suffering, the picture of exasperated patience.

Alex was not a patient man, or not with Nicklas: the first time Nicklas had zoned out at the rink, focused down on the scrape of Greenie’s laces as he untied his skates after practice, Alex had literally picked him up and carried him into the showers fully dressed.

“They taught you to do this?” Nicklas had sputtered, soaked through his pads.

“They teach me pay attention,” Alex had said, grinning, which even then Nicklas had recognized as the terribly, lethally dangerous threat that it was.

“I’m not giving it back,” Nicklas said now. He opened the book to somewhere in the middle and brought it to his face.

It smelled like soft, worn paper, wood pulp and Alex’s hands and Alex’s hockey bag and like a place, like the concrete and dust of a building where Nicklas had never been, a place filled with so many smells he couldn’t sort them out — dogs and heavy, thickly spiced food and wool and —

Nicklas closed his eyes again and breathed in Alex’s life, one lungful after the other.

 

* * *

Nicklas wasn’t psychic: he didn’t _always_ know where Alex was on the ice. It was only that he could always hear him, catch his voice as he yelled for the puck, catch the distinctive _shush_ of his skates. His stride was different, and the thick grunt of a collision sounded different from his throat.

Some sentinels could never fully focus when the game was on; some of them could never endure it. Their guide was lost in the morass of humanity, drowned out in the crowd, and they were gone.

Nicklas had never had the luxury of losing track of Alex.

 

* * *

Alex put his hands on Nicklas constantly. He guided by touch, according to his mother, who two weeks into Nicklas’s tenure in Washington had hired an actual Russian interpreter to sit Nicklas down and have a talk with him, which had scared the living shit out of Nicklas then and probably still would now.

“He was always a very attentive boy, always wanted to touch things to see what they were like,” the interpreter said as Mama Ovechkina stared directly at Nicklas, terrifyingly intense.

“Okay,” Nicklas said in English. “I’ll remember that.”

He would. It was good to know, that Alex was checking in with him, not fucking with him, when he put his broad palm on the back of Nicklas’s neck and pressed his forefinger and thumb gently against the muscles there.

Nicklas could feel Alex’s touch like a ghost for hours after every game, could hear the heavy panting of his breath, could smell his sweat and the lingering vanilla of his shampoo. It stuck on Nicklas, smeared over him like Vaseline, a thin film between him and everything else. Nicklas never zoned out on anything after games, because he couldn’t focus at all; in this, Alex was a very, very effective guide.

Mama Ovechkina stared harder, then said something in Russian. She was good at working with interpreters, or maybe just good at intimidation: she never looked away from Nicklas, never made it remotely less than clear just exactly whom she was addressing.

“If he does something that bothers you, you should tell him,” the interpreter said.

“He’s not bothering me,” Nicklas said immediately. Was that a lie? No. Sort of. Alex didn’t do anything that didn’t _work_ , and he didn’t have any reason to believe that Nicklas didn’t need his help.

Sentinels were supposed to struggle with reality; they were supposed to have a hard time breaking free of their own thoughts. They were supposed to need help, and if ever Nicklas needed help with being distracted, well, Alex was sure to be there.

Alex was doing what he was supposed to, as a guide. Alex was keeping Nicklas from getting bogged down in his own thoughts, in his own singular experience, from getting trapped on a scent, on the color of the logo under the ice, on the pressure of his helmet on his scalp.

Mama Ovechkina raised an incisive eyebrow, but Nicklas didn’t have the words for all of that.

Alex wasn’t bothering Nicklas, it was just that — _I can’t think when he’s touching me_ , Nicklas thought, and in that regard, Alex was doing everything he was supposed to.

 

* * *

Nicklas had gotten better at thinking when Alex was near him. He’d had to: Alex was always there, jumping on him after every goal, talking to Nicklas in a low voice as they drifted past the refs, pulling Nicklas’s jersey over his pads, opening the passenger-side door of his ridiculous cars.

Nicklas assisted on Alex’s goals and Alex crushed him into the boards. Alex scored and people screamed — whole teams screamed, whole arenas screamed, jumped up and lost their minds. They dropped their beers, dropped their keys, blinded Nicklas in a nauseating rush of sensation, and he could feel his face going blank as he tried to smile, tried to stay inside himself. When it was bad enough, he couldn’t tell where the team was, couldn’t tell where anything was, couldn’t hear anything but the voice of a single linesman, and then Alex was there, rocketing into him, the one thing Nicklas couldn’t ignore.

Nicklas scored and Alex surrounded him, hugged him until he couldn’t hear the screams, couldn’t feel the seismic burst of air from all those lungs, couldn’t be thrown off-balance by anything but Alex, Alex.

 

* * *

Alex brought Nicklas pieces of fabric from craft stores for him to rub between his fingers on the bus when he got tired of regulating his own senses; Alex brought Nicklas Russian tea that tasted like oranges and dirt. 

They sat through the worst sex Nicklas had ever heard in an airplane bathroom. They sat through injuries, and negotiations. They sat through days that seemed hopeless; they flamed out of the playoffs and they won and then they won again. Nicklas got boarded so hard he was spitting blood and Alex nearly got suspended. They swept the Rangers, and Alex took them to a grimy dive bar and turned Nicklas’s world upside down.

 

* * *

The less said about that night, the better. Nicklas had never been so fucking embarrassed, been so out of control — he’d never done _any_ of that, because who the fuck _does_ that? Who the fuck thinks it’s fun to — whose terrible idea was that, for Alex to put his _hand_ down his fucking _pants_ in a public bar and take Nicklas, and make Nicklas — who the fuck would even —

Alex would, of course; drunk, reckless Alex, whose inebriation had never gotten in the way of his ability to pay attention to Nicklas. Alex’s wild side had never once stopped him from noticing Nicklas, noticing the speed of Nicklas’s breath, noticing the discomfort in his shoulders or the way he ran his fingers over the surfaces around him. Drunk, Alex was just more prone to move on all the bad ideas he had, and Nicklas had never quite figured out how to adjust to that.

 

* * *

It had taken Nicklas a long time to get Alex to understand the extent of Nicklas’s own capabilities. It had taken Nicklas years to convince Alex that the world around them was not so very disturbing to him after all, and that Nicklas could, in the end, adjust.

Nicklas had never tried to explain to Alex the magnitude of his own effect, tried to describe the shockwave of sensation that swept through him when Alex slammed into him and spun him around, never tried to communicate the uniquely unbalanced experience of being consumed, enveloped, submerged in the physical presence of Alexander Ovechkin.

 

* * *

It had taken Alex three hours to get them out of that bar and twenty minutes to kick Greenie out of the room to go sleep with Sasha Semin. Nicklas had been exhausted and still low-level mortified and he’d leaned his whole body against the doorjamb and put his head back and listened to them argue from a great, vague distance.

“Nicky?” Alex had said.

“Nick,” Greenie had said. “Shit, Nick, are you okay? Are you with us?”

“He’s not gone anywhere,” Alex said. “He just bored. Go away. We gotta talk.”

Mike had left.

 

* * *

Alex had apologized.

“I shouldn’t do that,” he’d said. “It’s not okay,” which was, yes — yes, you’re right, he _shouldn’t_ do that, no one should do that, it was illegal and embarrassing and Nicklas was — Jesus _fuck_ , it was _not_ okay.

“I’m fine now,” Nicklas had said. Alex had stared at him for a long, long time, looking like nothing so much as his own mother. Alex rubbed his hands together slowly, the rasp of his callouses familiar and engrossing.

Nicklas could hear his heartbeat, steady but slightly too fast. If he focused, he could hear the brush of Alex’s shirt collar against his skin as he breathed; if he focused, he could see the way Alex’s jaw flexed minutely before he spoke.

“I do something you don’t like, you say,” Alex said.

“I know,” Nicklas said. Say? He couldn’t have said anything in the bar — what would he have said? _Stop jerking off in public_? 

_Are you — are you doing this on purpose, are you fucking with me on purpose? Are you — do you think this is funny? What the fuck are you thinking?_

He couldn’t have focused enough to make words if he’d tried. It was unfair, the way Alex could catch his attention, unfair and debilitating, and Nicklas wasn’t used to being made that vulnerable by it.

Nicklas was quiet for long enough that Alex stood up.

“I can go,” he said. 

“What?” Nicklas said, confused. “Go where? Mike’s in your room with Semin.”

“We can share,” Alex had told him.

Nicklas could have made him stay and sleep in Greenie’s bed. Nicklas could have asked, and Alex would have done it, because Alex was right: Alex was the one who’d crossed the line, and he was the one who was trying to make things right. He was the one who had to ask permission.

Nicklas took a breath and tried to focus. Their room smelled like Alex now, Alex and bar-bathroom soap and faintly, faintly of sex and, yeah, maybe Nicklas needed a break.

“That would be nice,” Nicklas had said.

Alex had left.

 

* * *

If Nicklas thought about that night, it wasn’t Alex’s fault. If Nicklas shook himself awake from strange dreams of Alex on his back on his own bed, breathing hard, it wasn’t Alex doing it. Alex had taken the whole event as a cue to be extremely, meticulously careful about keeping his sex life away from Nicklas. 

Nicklas couldn’t blame Alex for ever rubbing it in, bringing it around; he smelled like sweat and blood and fried chicken around Nicklas, but he never, never smelled of sex. He never did more than put his arm around a woman in Nicklas’s presence, and if it had helped at all then Nicklas would have been thankful.

It wasn’t really Alex in his mind, watching Nicklas’s skin pebble beneath the drag of his fingertips; it wasn’t Alex who was really doing that, pressing the huge breadth of his hands over Nicklas’s hips and holding him still, holding him down to kiss him, to touch him, to grab Nicklas’s hair and choke out moans into his ear —

Alex wasn’t doing that. Nicklas wasn’t really doing it either, or not on purpose: the fact of the matter was, reality really was a little too much to take sometimes, and Nicklas was never going to get used to Alex.

 

* * *

Nicklas did manage to get out, and away from Alex. He did manage to get laid, and have a few girlfriends. He did manage to score a few goals, set a few records, and get sent to the All-Star Game by _himself_ because Alex had hurt his ankle, which was so stupid on so many levels.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do if something happens?” Nicklas had snapped. Trotz and Alex were looking at him with varying degrees of alarm and chagrin.

“I know it’s not the same, but Kuznetsov is a trained guide,” Trotz had told him. “You and him can spend a little more time together during the next couple of weeks and you’ll be fine. And really, Nick,” Trotz said admonishingly, “you probably don’t even need that.”

Alex looked vaguely mutinous from his spot in front of his locker, but this was his own fucking fault, pushing for Nicklas to go to this stupid game in the first place —

“Fine,” Nicklas had said. “Fine, I’m sure Kuzya will be as good as anyone.” Alex took off his left skate and let it drop with a thud.

“Oh-kay,” Trotz said, “I’m not getting in the middle of this.”

“There is no _this_ ,” Nicklas said curtly. “There is no problem at all.”

 

* * *

If Alex slammed his locker door especially hard after Nicklas and Trotz had left, well, the walls were thick enough for normal ears. No one else could hear it.

 

* * *

Nicklas only zoned out once at the All-Star Game, in the hallway of the hotel outside his door.

He could hear Kuzya talking to him; he could feel the air on his skin. It was dry in here, heavily cooled and heated and cooled again, and it made the hairs on the backs of his arm stand up. It made his lips and tongue feel uncomfortable. 

_Nicklas_ , Kuzya was saying. _Nick, Nick._ Someone else was there with him, someone Nicklas didn’t know. From another team, maybe? 

He blinked, trying to clear the dryness of the air off his inner eyelids. His eyes were gritty. 

He licked his lips. That only felt worse.

He breathed in, dry, dry air —

He closed his eyes against it —

His tongue felt strange where it touched his teeth —

“Nicky?” Alex said. “Nicky.”

Nicklas breathed in the horrible, parched air and opened his mouth.

“Nicky,” Alex said again, a little artificial, a little — oh. Kuzya was holding a phone up to Nicklas’s ear. Nicklas could hear the wet noise of Alex taking a drink of something.

“You gone? Kuzma’s freaking out, Nicky.”

“Yes,” Nicklas said. “No, no. I’m here.”

 

* * *

Toronto smelled like old wet cardboard and popcorn, and the bathroom door in Nicklas’s hotel room had an unfortunate squeak to it that scraped over his nerves like a fork on tinfoil.

“What’s wrong?” Alex asked when Nicklas sat down in the lockers before their first away game of the series, a little dazed and still stuck on the unpleasant odor of the mystery trashbag in some forgotten basement.

Nicklas blinked, slowly, slowly. He could get back. He was coming back. The noises of the room got perceptibly louder, like the volume coming up on a TV.

Alex sat down next to him and gripped his knee. He leaned into Nicklas’s side and put his chin on Nicklas’s shoulder and said, “Nicky.”

Alex was a force of nature; Alex was human smelling salts. Nicklas sucked in air as all his equalizers reset to factory standard.

“I’m here,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m here.” He turned to face Alex, two inches away, taking up all the slack, filling all the extra space in Nicklas’s senses.

“I know,” Alex said smugly. Nicklas rolled his eyes.

 

* * *

It had taken Nicklas quite a while to realize that Alex got _jealous_ when he zoned out.

Alex was a possessive person; Nicklas was attentive enough to figure that out on his own. Alex didn’t like it when the people he liked ignored him, and he fucking loved it when those same people paid attention to him, him, only to him. This had never been a point of contention between them, since Alex could make Nicklas pay attention to him simply by existing. 

 

* * *

When Nicklas played, he could almost always filter out the worst of the noises. He could adjust to the chirps and the piercing screams of fans and the brutal sounds of body on body, the smell of blood and the ugly noises of joints popping.

Alex’s knee, though, made a horrible grinding crunch as he went over Kadri’s back and onto the ice, and Nicklas flinched with his whole body.

 

* * *

Alex came back onto the ice as if anyone in their right mind could believe he was okay.

“Can’t keep a good man down,” Nate laughed, delighted, and Nicklas remembered that no one out there was in their right fucking mind anyway.

“Don’t worry, Nicky,” Alex said cheerfully. Carlson was close enough to hear; Alex wasn’t speaking for Nicklas’s sake. “Gonna be fine.”

Nicklas nodded, numb, and tried not to zone out on the steady, sickening noise of Alex’s knee as he walked to the bench and sat down next to Nicklas.

 

* * *

He could hear it when he’d half-carried Alex off the ice, for fuck’s sake. Who the fuck did Alex think he was fooling?

 

* * *

Trotz came up to him when they were packing up their gear, grim and determined, and Nicklas stepped out of the scrum for him.

“How bad is it?” Trotz said. “He won’t tell me.”

How bad was it? Pretty fucking bad, Nicklas thought, but it wasn’t his body making those noises. It wasn’t him faking his way through the pain. It wasn’t his leadership they needed, and it wasn’t his image of invincibility to maintain.

“He says it’s fine,” Nicklas said. “So it’s fine.” Trotz snorted.

“Right,” he said.

“I’m not psychic, and he tells me the same shit he tells you,” Nicklas said, pissed off anew at the whole situation. “How am I going to make him tell the truth?”

Trotz crossed his arms and looked at Nicklas.

“Don’t play dumb with me, Nick,” he said. “We both know better than that.”

 

* * *

Alex opened his front door in sweatpants and no shirt at eleven thirty at night. Nicklas blinked.

“You follow me home, Nicky?” Alex said.

“No,” Nicklas said, pushing in past him to stand in the foyer. “I had to take my car home from the rink, you saw me.”

Nicklas had given Alex two hours to settle in, and then he’d picked up his keys and his pride and driven over to Alex’s absurd, fairly ugly mansion to have a talk about what Alex was willing to put his body through in order to win.

Anything, Nicklas knew. Anything, of course, but how much was that?

“Stay here,” Alex told him, and went to put all the dogs in the backyard.

 

* * *

Alex installed him in the den with a glass of juice from a box printed with bright Cyrillic letters that smelled incredibly strange.

“What is this?” Nicklas asked, squinting at the thick pink liquid. Alex shrugged.

“Tropical fruit,” he said. “Not sure how many kind.”

“You’re giving the sentinel mystery juice? Really?” Nicklas asked, pretending he couldn’t hear Alex’s knee as he walked through the room.

Alex finally, finally came over to the sofa and flopped down beside him.

“I give my sentinel whatever I think gonna be good,” he said. “What you doing here, Nicky?”

“How fucked up is your knee?” Nicklas asked. He put his juice on the coffee table.

“It’s fine.”

“It’s _not_ ,” Nicklas said. “It sounds horrible. I’m not deaf. How bad is it?”

Alex glared at him and shifted slightly away. Nicklas sighed.

“Trainers wanna know?” Alex asked suspiciously.

“ _I_ want to know,” Nicklas snapped. “Fuck’s sake, Alex, I’m allowed to worry.”

Alex pulled in a breath and held it. He looked almost surprised, though Nicklas knew he knew they both hated it when Alex was injured.

God knew they both hated it when Nicklas was injured.

“Sorry,” Alex said after a long, long pause. “It’s not so good, Nicky.”

Alex pulled up the cuff of his sweats until it rolled over his kneecap. The inside half of his knee was bruised and red, boggy and soft-looking.

“I don’t think I tear anything,” Alex said, but they both knew that was wishful thinking.

Nicklas ran his fingers over the skin; it felt hot under the bruise, and Alex shivered. Nicklas was barely touching him, barely pressing. The flesh around Alex’s knee was dense and swollen, and his kneecap felt stiff and trapped in place. He’d iced it earlier: there was a drop of cold water by the tendon of his thigh, clinging to the coarse hair.

“Nicky,” Alex said softly, and Nicklas realized he was almost gone, zoning out on Alex’s couch at nearly midnight, lost in the feel of his skin.

This was not what Nicklas had come here to say. If there had ever been a plan, this was not it.

“Sorry,” Nicklas said, slowly coming back into himself, slowly taking stock of the room around them. Alex had the heat on, just a little. The hiss of air through the vents warred with the whisper of Alex’s breath. Nicklas swept his thumb over the expanse of clear, pale skin of Alex’s thigh, and Alex —

Alex breathed in, sudden and soft, abruptly, shockingly familiar, and Nicklas was drenched in the memory of a filthy bar a long, long time ago.

Nicklas stopped moving. Alex breathed out, thick and overwhelming. Nicklas felt himself go all the way out of reality.

“What you doing?” Alex said.

He could smell the plastic from the ice-pack that Alex had had on his leg; he could smell the generic soap of the airplane bathroom that lingered on the skin of Alex’s forearms. He could feel the goosebumps start to form beneath the pad of his thumb — he couldn’t quite stop moving it, couldn’t quite break the link between his fingers and his mind, between the nerves of his skin and the synapses of his brain, firing and firing and firing.

Alex said something. Nicklas could barely hear him speak, though Nicklas could hear nothing but his breathing. The wonder of zoning out was not the gain of sensation but the loss of it: the refuge of a mind overcome was in the selection of only a bare few sensations, in the curation of only that scant focus. Nicklas at his most normal could hear, and see, and smell and feel and taste the world in its million parts. It was when everything fell away that he got caught.

He didn’t zone out on Alex. Well, he had, once before, but that had been — different, Nicklas thought. It was, in some ways, impossible to tell; the sound of Alex’s breathing, shaky and irregular, was similar, though Nicklas doubted the impetus for that was the —

Alex’s hand on his face felt distant.

It moved to Nicklas’s hair, persistent and repetitive, and Nicklas started to feel, to feel it —

Alex’s other hand was around his wrist —

Alex’s voice was speaking in Russian, nothing Nicklas knew —

Alex licked his lips. Alex squeezed Nicklas’s wrist tighter. Alex’s fingers twisted in his hair and then let go.

“Fuck,” Nicklas whispered.

“Come back,” Alex said, tense and sharp. “Nicky, wake up.”

He sounded distressed; he sounded more alarmed than the situation warranted. Nicklas lifted his hand off of Alex’s leg, and Alex released his wrist.

“You here?” Alex asked, and Nicklas nodded. He was; he was. Almost.

“Sorry,” Nicklas said again. He looked around and found his juice on the table.

It was warm when he picked it up. He put it back down.

“Alex,” Nicklas said warily, craning his head to see into the kitchen. The red numbers of the stove clock read _1:57._

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Nicklas said. “Fuck, I’m —”

“It’s okay,” Alex said quickly, even though it was _not_. “It’s okay, just a little scared.”

“Jesus fuck,” Nicklas said. Shit, shit. He hadn’t — he didn’t think he’d been gone for more than twenty minutes in at least ten years. Mother _fuck_. That was not the plan.

“What happened?” Alex said. “You hurt, Nicky? I don’t see you get hit, but you know there’s problem with picking up concussions for —”

“Am _I_ hurt?” Nicklas said, baffled. He still felt foggy, and his fingertips were burning a little. “What? No. What?”

Alex shifted his leg and pushed the cuff of his pants down. It was two in the fucking morning, Nicklas thought, and they were both old. They needed to go to bed.

“You don’t do… that,” Alex said as Nicklas stood.

“I do that all the time time,” Nicklas corrected. “Not for that _long_ , and I don’t know what happened, Alex, but it felt the same as any time I was gone. I’m not concussed,” he added at Alex’s deeply skeptical look.

“You don’t get stuck with me,” Alex said, and for a brief, confusing moment Nicklas thought he was just being outrageously hubristic — Nicklas didn’t zone out with Alex around? Yes, he did; it happened at least every other week, which Alex knew because he was, by definition, _there_.

Alex frowned.

“Oh,” Nicklas said. “I don’t zone out _on_ you? No,” he said, “not usually.”

“On, with, fine,” Alex said dismissively. He stood carefully, face to face with Nicklas in the dim glow of the kitchen lights. “Not usual? Never, Nicky. You sure you not concussed? I can tell trainers,” he threatened happily, and Nicklas narrowed his eyes and tried to get Alex Ovechkin to think his own jokes weren’t funny.

Alex smiled beatifically.

“To be honest, it was one time,” Nicklas said blandly, “not never. But no, not usually.”

It was dark; Nicklas was tired. It was the middle of the night and he was already distracted by Alex’s knee, but he would have _had_ to be concussed to miss the tinge of warmth that suddenly came off of Alex’s skin, the faint blush of red that spread over his cheeks.

“Anyway, you’re normally too much, you know,” he waved his hand at Alex, trying to encompass the vast array of personal qualities that served to make it mostly impossible for Nicklas to focus on only one part of him. “Too much input to zone out on.”

“I’m not too much anything,” Alex said, soundingly vaguely hurt, the blush receding. “I’m just right amount of input. Perfect. Too much?”

Nicklas picked up his juice and tried not to miss the flush of Alex’s cheeks now that it was gone; Alex never stayed embarrassed for long. “Yes,” he deadpanned. “You’re perfect. Anyone would be crazy to think otherwise.”

“Right,” Alex said. He didn’t sound as smug as he ought to have.

Nicklas stared at the juice. “This is actually good,” he said.

“I know,” Alex said, moving into Nicklas’s space to take the glass from him and put it back down. “Nicky, if I’m too much noise, too much sense for you —”

“Alex,” Nicklas said; was he _worried?_ What the hell, did he think Nicklas would have just dealt with it this whole time, wouldn’t have — “Alex, I would tell you. I would have told you a _long_ time ago.”

“‘Too much’ don’t sound perfect, Nicky,” Alex said, his eyes searching Nicklas’s face, his right hand hovering six inches from Nicklas’s elbow, and how Alex had ever thought he _wasn’t_ too much input, ever thought that he didn’t overwhelm and overload at every turn was a goddamned mystery to Nicklas. Alex was breathing hard with concern, somehow managing to fit his body into eighty percent of the space around Nicklas without even touching him, and he thought he wasn’t too much input?

Nicklas shook his head. Alex frowned harder.

“You get my attention,” Nicklas told him, smiling against his own better intentions.

 

* * *

 

If Nicklas had been trying to be romantic, he might have thought twice. If he’d been trying to woo Alex, sweep him off his feet, it might have occurred to him that that was tantamount to a declaration of love, coming from Nicklas Backstrom.

If he’d given it two seconds of consideration, he would’ve realized that there was probably nothing else from him that Alex would like to hear more.

 

* * *

 

Alex was extremely, meticulously careful, but that didn’t make Nicklas forget.

Alex’s breath caught in his throat, and he shifted his weight to his good leg — Nicklas could feel the heat spilling off of him, could see the color wash over the back of Alex’s neck. He had half a second to think, _what the hell_ before Alex’s hand landed on his arm and slid up his bicep to dig his fingers into the muscle.

Nicklas opened his mouth and sucked in air, and Alex made one hell of a sound.

This, this was too much input. What the fuck was Alex — what was he doing, and _why_ , and why _now_ , was Nicklas missing, missing something —

“Nicky,” Alex said, fuck, clearly predatory; Nicklas could hear the creak of Alex’s knee as he stepped closer, but there wasn’t time enough to — “Don’t know what to do about this. I’m sorry.”

“What?” Nicklas said stupidly.

It was too much, too much. Alex was waiting on something, but Nicklas was a hundred miles back, lost in the feeling of Alex’s palm like fire against his skin.

“You know — you know I want. Know what I think about you,” Alex said, low and intent. He caught Nicklas’s eyes and held them; his lips were slightly parted.

It would be easier, Nicklas thought, to get control of himself if any of this made any _sense_.

“I’m sorry?” he asked, and Alex’s face broke into an amazed grin.

“Liar,” Alex said. “You don’t pay attention at all.”

“You — what, yes I do, and no you _don’t_ ,” Nicklas struggled. Alex wasn’t touching him any less; somehow he seemed to be touching him _more_ , if that was possible, or maybe Nicklas was just, just feeling it. Feeling it more. Fuck, _what?_

“I don’t?” Alex asked, smirking.

“No,” Nicklas protested. “You, you never —”

“‘Never’?” Alex said, and Nicklas felt his voice go through him like flame.

Once, fine. Once, Alex had made a drunken, foolish decision, but sometimes Alex did that.

“That was an accident,” Nicklas said faintly.

Alex was closer now, further into Nicklas’s space, both hands on him now, everywhere at once, and Nicklas closed his eyes againstthe strange, enveloping rush of it. His blood felt thin in his veins, moving too fast. He could breathe, but all the air was Alex, thick with the scent of his skin.

Nicklas was never, never getting free of this.

“You know what I think about you,” Alex said from somewhere in front of Nicklas, softly, softly, in the careful voice he used when Nicklas wanted quiet.

Alex pursed his lips and released them with a soft sound, and Nicklas leaned forward and kissed him.

Alex’s mouth was hot; Alex’s beard was brushing at the edge of Nicklas’s lips, his cheeks, and oh, _fuck_ , Alex really had thought about this.

He was breathing the same air; he was kissing Nicklas like he was dying. He was everywhere. He was devouring Nicklas.

He was barely touching him.

Nicklas opened his mouth and Alex’s teeth touched the soft flesh of Nicklas’s lower lip, pushing, denting in, oh god, sending sparks up Nicklas’s spine —

“Nicky,” Alex groaned, and Nicklas had never heard that tone to his voice before.

Nicklas tried to kiss back, tried to do something other than disintegrate. Alex’s hands were covering him, Jesus, leaving trails of sensation from his hips to his shoulderblades. Alex pushed his left hand under Nicklas’s shirt.

NIcklas let his head drop to Alex’s shoulder and tried to stay standing. Alex was walking him backwards, hopefully towards someplace Nicklas could put his head in a bucket of icewater.

He was _so_ hot; there was sweat forming the base of his spine. He was dying, fuck, drowning in it, and Alex wasn’t helping, oh my god —

Alex ducked his head and slid his tongue into Nicklas’s mouth at the same time he flicked his thumb over Nicklas’s nipple, and Nicklas felt his gut give a dangerous, molten lurch.

Alex was hard against his hip, making soft, choked-off noises into his mouth; Alex was tipping him back onto — fuck, who fucking knew, it could be the floor for all Nicklas knew. He could be anywhere.

Fuck, it was too much.

“Alex,” he moaned. Oh god, Alex just needed, he needed to touch Nicklas less, or more: he needed to stop stripping Nicklas’s shirt off over his head, he never, never needed to stop kissing down Nicklas’s neck to his chest, to his — fuck, oh —

Alex’s hands were on his hips, unzipping his jeans and pushing them down to his thighs. Nicklas’s hands dug into the — blanket? carpet? —

“Oh my god,” Nicklas said.

His whole body felt electric, lit up and taut; he could see shapes but they assembled into nothing. Alex pinned his hips down and put his hot, hot mouth around Nicklas’s cock and Nicklas forgot about vision entirely.

Words were a loss. Nicklas managed a high-pitched, helpless noise before he gave up on regulating anything, on paying attention to anything but the brainmelting slide of Alex’s tongue, oh, shit, _shit_ , it was so good —

Mother _fuck_ , Nicklas was so close —

Alex’s cheeks hollowed and Nicklas couldn’t, he couldn’t —

He turned his face to the side and clenched his eyes shut and came in Alex’s mouth, a thunderclap, a blinding flash of light.

 

* * *

 

He was on a bed. Great. That was better than the floor.

“God,” Nicklas groaned. “Holy shit, Alex.”

He opened his eyes to find Alex looming over him, one elbow by Nicklas’s shoulder, looking less amused than desperate.

“Oh,” Nicklas said.

Alex had definitely thought about this, but so had Nicklas.

 

* * *

 

Alex came in about ten minutes, during which time Nicklas only zoned out twice and both times only a _very_ little bit, so really he hardly deserved whatever bitten-off Russian invective he was getting thrown at him.

It was engrossing; he couldn’t be blamed. Alex’s blush went down to his navel and blanched beautifully when Nicklas bit him gently. Alex’s ears were absurdly sensitive, and the noises Alex made when Nicklas kissed the outer edge were too —

“Fuck you, _fuck_ , Nicky,” Alex snapped, “ _please_ —”

Right, sorry.

  

* * *

 

The water in Alex’s house tasted more strongly of copper than Nicklas’s. He could smell the difference from the glass as Alex handed it to him, but he drank anyway: it didn’t taste bad, exactly.

Alex’s knee made a gristly, clicking noise as he heaved himself onto the bed beside Nicklas.

“Are you going to tell the trainers?” Nicklas asked. Alex twisted to look at him.

“Yes,” he said. “Bad enough. I know.”

“Okay,” Nicklas said; Alex stayed where he was, sitting up against the headboard on a pillow. He was mirroring Nicklas, Nicklas realized.

“You staying here?” Alex asked finally.

Ah.

Nicklas hadn’t thought it through yet, honestly.

“Do you want me to?” Nicklas said. Alex smiled.

“Nicky,” he said, “what you think?”

 

* * *

 

Alex slept like the dead, and every time Nicklas woke up, he had a different limb splayed out over the covers to touch Nicklas.

Nicklas gave in to sentiment and kissed his palm before reaching down and gently pushing Alex’s knee back to his own side of the bed.

 

* * *

 

Toronto smelled like garbage, and the fans were deafening, a wave of blue and white. Nicklas could hear each one of their voices in the explosion of cheering, could pick up individual curses, single words.

He dodged left and then spun backwards to avoid Komarov. Someone pounded on the glass behind him.

He blinked, too slow. The ice felt soft under his skates. He looked down; the puck was on his blade, fuck, right, _fuck_ , he needed —

“Nicky,” Alex called from across the ice, and Nicklas sent it to his tape without looking up.


End file.
